General Information About Taking A Coredump

Coredumps can be a time consuming process (hours or so).  Sometimes not (perhaps <20 minutes).  This documentation is for those who have not taken a coredump before, or in some time, and would like to know what to expect when taking a coredump.  It is not intended to be overly detailed and cover every aspect of taking a coredump.

After you have SET AUTO RESTART AFTER ABEND=0 and abend, or are forcing a coredump, a screen similar to that found below should appear (NetWare Debugger Screen):

Be sure to choose the option that will copy the diagnostic image to disk (COREDUMP).  These screenshots are from a NetWare 6.5 server, your option keys may vary slightly.

At this point you will be asked a series of questions:

 

This option is not available on NetWare 5.1.  The server will reboot automatically.

 

Choose option 2) FULL W/O CACHE

 

Answer YES to compress the coredump.

 

Here you will need to make a decision.  It is best to dump the image to the local disk if possible.*  On NetWare 5.1 you will not see this screen, but will see the next instead. 

If NetWare 5.1 users need to send the coredump image across the network please refer to TID 10098883 and follow the same instructions for NetWare 6.0

 

You can change this information.  If you have another DOS drive, you can point the image dump to the other device.  ie D:\MyServiceRequestNumber.IMG

 

This final screen shot was taken while the coredump was in process.  It will continue to increment as page X of page Y is written.

 

After the coredump image has been written, boot the server.  The image is now at the root of the DOS partition if that is where it was pointed to (there by default).  You can copy the image up from DOS to you SYS or some other volume using a variety of utilities.  CPQFM, JCMD (except on NetWare 6.5), NETBASIC (Load netbasic, then shell or nsnshell depending on your NetWare version.  You can't cd into C:\, but you can still copy from it), NetWare Remote Manager (pull the file from the server onto your local workstation), and so forth. 

After you have the image, please rename it to your service request number, upload it to ftp.novell.com/incoming, and email or contact your assigned engineer after the upload is complete.

*To determine if there is sufficient space on the local drive ask the following two questions:

1.  How much physical memory does the server have?

2.  How much FREE space do you have on your DOS partition?

Each image is unique, therefore an exact percentage cannot be given; however, based on past experience if following the options outline above, 25-35 percent of the memory is needed as free space.  This means that with 4GB of memory 1G to 1.5GB of free space should be available for the coredump (this is VERY generalized).  The actual image can be greater or smaller than this.  If you have further questions about this, please contact your support engineer.
Formerly known as TID# 10099907